y

Final dinners in magical Lucca flat:

1. spaghettini with mushrooms, ricotta, and white pepper

2. fagioli scritti with celery and marjoram; stuffed artichokes (finocchiona, pecorino di Lucca, basil, garlic, bread crumbs, olive oil, pepper, salt)

3. romanesco “steaks” over roasted graffiti eggplant and red pepper purée

4. roasted romanesco, farm egg, wild arugula salad

Today, I am jealous of those just arriving, want to grab them by the lapels and tell them they too will cry bitterly when they have to leave.

Small joys of Lucca, partial list:
Expelling an intact disc of espresso grounds when cleaning the Bialetti’s funnel filter.

When I ask for cinque o sei fette at La Grotta, and the tall, sunned fellow with the sparkling eyes shows me perfect slices of finocchiona or salame toscano or prosciutto cotto laid out on the paper, raises them aloft toward me like he’s presenting a newborn.

The bespectacled trio who has everything you need behind and in front of the counters at Forno Alimentari G. Giurlani, the members of which appear to be in their 70s or older and no stock boy in sight: bald signore in his apron, brunette signora missing the top thirds of several fingers, blonde signora in her silk scarf and movie star glasses.

Bitter, red sodas in petite glass bottles. You can find Sanbitter - which essentially tastes like carbonated, nonalcoholic Campari in San Francisco - but here there are several kinds available, including Aperol’s own soda, and versions with an orange or bitter lemon component. I like how bracing they are, both in flavor and color. I’ve been mixing them over ice with gin (decidedly un-Italian, but the botanical edge matches well) and a slice of lemon.

Stocking up on drinking water at the public fountains - cold and sweet from taps over wide marble bowls wearing mineral shadows. Dads with metal carriers to house four, six bottles, and young soccer teams in their practice garb doing the same.

Flood of citrus perfume down Via Vallisneri. A fig tree leafing out from a high veranda and fanning over an especially narrow passage below Via Santa Croce.

Bats flapping - feverishly, cheerfully (it looks the same) - along the canal at night, coming into view in the street lanterns and then soaring back into the darkness.

The love graffiti - fewer tags and more “TI AMO ISABELLA.” I love you this big, a building’s worth, an uncontainable amount.

Atop the walls: how the week’s rain turned up the visual volume; shade provided by enormous trees with tiny candy confetti blossoms - white with pink and yellow centers, stacked in cones, candles among the branches; wide hope of the bulwarks, bowing out from the circular path, every one providing a green berth of safety.

Proper cups, saucers and spoons for coffee at every bar. No “to go” culture, and the symphony of clinks resulting from staying put.

All of the different hellos but especially the excessive goodbyes - a string of farewells at the end of both in-person interactions and phone calls, arrivederci-buonasera-ciao-ciao.

Learning how to pronounce words I had previously only referenced in print by listening in on conversations the next table over, of passers-by - hard l’s, soft c’s, z’s that sting, when phrases are strident and when they are gentle.

Imagining the nuns as real brassy broads, especially the one in her white habit and cream cardigan who I see toddling down Via Del Gallo - side to side on an interchanging, diagonal path, a slow efficiency.

One of Lucca’s heirloom beans: fagiolo scritto (fagioli scritti, pl.) beans “written on” (or “beans wrote of Lucca” as I saw in one funny translation). The long pods are magenta and crimson with white stripes (the inscriptions), and the beans themselves run the gamut from opal, to white with wine-colored streaks, to bright purple with white dashes. Once cooked, they look like larger pinto beans with darker brick markings, but you retain the memory of their technicolor raw state while eating them.

The low-key attitude around safety, kids standing on the backs or sitting on the handlebars of their parents’ bicycles as an acceptable form of transportation. No helmets on anyone, a medium pace. Implied proclamation: relax, we’re all going to get there in one piece.

How everyone is visible, out and about, no generation favored or given more air time or attributed more worth than another.

How la passeggiata gathers steam throughout the week, a party by Sunday, locals and visitors alike married to revelry in the weekend’s waning hours.

Apprehending that anything is possible in my own language, what a liberty it is to be able to state and inquire.

***

Two days ago, they erected scaffolding around the single column on Piazza Santa Maria, shrouded it in white cloth. It’s time to go.

More soon: Castiglioncello, Firenze. Tomorrow, I travel 10 hours south, by train, to Lecce, deep in the heel of the boot.

My love flew back to California a week ago, marking the next phase of my sabbatical, the part on my own. It was brutal seeing him off at the train station. He found a track-side seat, unlatched and leaned out of the window to extend our goodbye. I ran off the platform shortly after, ripping the bandage, then back, rapping on the window, to retrieve the forgotten postcards he had asked me to mail. I waited in line at the post office, also the bank, and had a confusing exchange with one of the tellers, who gave me the impression that sending three pieces of mail to the U.S. was impossible at worst and wishful thinking at best. He peered over his glasses as me, turned to peck incredulously at his keyboard, held out his right hand, palm spread, and his left thumb - six euro. I handed over exact change.

I knew the day of Josh’s departure was important for setting the tone of my solo mission, for re-inhabiting the trip on different but equally positive terms. I kept moving, took a long walk outside the walls, went grocery shopping, and stayed up late cooking dinner. It is strange business for me to just worry about and take care of myself, but there’s nothing else to do here but that. In my anonymous bubble in liminal Lucca, I’m relatively free of compounded emotions, those routinely soaked up from others around me and layered underneath or on top of my own. The only emotional states to absorb, reflect upon, and tend to are mine alone. Put on a sweater, eat a snack, call someone or read something - it’s not that hard, and an obvious lesson. What Josh has repeated, sometimes pleadingly, to me for years: Take care of others by taking care of yourself.

***

Josh is not someone you could ever imagine in advance of meeting. No part of him leans toward type, and every part of him spans, splits, and obliterates category. His hair and beard contain every color naturally available - brown, red, black, blonde, gray, white. He is kind, brave, smart, handsome, resourceful, and impish. He is extraordinarily sane and affable, a person who is also a litmus test - if you don’t like him, you might be dead on the inside. He has about nine distinct laughs. If you have kids or are interested in raising kids who are independent, infinitely capable, and steeped in positive outlook, see if Ginny and Al will overnight you a blueprint of the nurturing and let-live activities in which they engaged while raising Josh.

We have an inexplicable aphid problem in our concrete back yard, but Josh’s efforts to grow tomatoes, peppers, salad greens, and herbs every summer will not be thwarted. One year, he attempted integrated pest management by unleashing an army of ladybugs on the besieged plants. Another, he built a tabletop greenhouse to protect his seedlings. Every spring, he gathers fresh resolve, considers new solutions.

Thanks to Josh, our lives have an epic soundtrack. When I tell him to put on the love records, he knows this means George Harrison or the Beach Boys or ELO or Sam Cooke or some esoteric 45 recently retrieved from Grooves, and the exact songs on which to drop the needle.

I am Josh’s opposite - a nervous, lazy pessimist - and our temperamental differences make me feel even luckier to be number one of his three great loves, the other two being art and baseball. While I think it takes more time to travel places than it actually does, Josh generally budgets less time than required - and the reality lies somewhere in the middle. I think we’re all going to die; Josh believes we’re all going to live and prosper! He waters the plants and I write the thank-you notes. I remember the small details and he looks toward the horizon. We prefer to be together, but have varied interests and are plenty comfortable spending time apart in doses as well. I also miss him even when we’re in the same room, and tell him so. I am nostalgic about our story as it’s unfolding; he replies, “But I’m right here!” We’re a good balancing act.

As a teenager, and into my adult life, I always gambled big on love. Moved places, stayed places, risked limb and sanity in bear and rattlesnake country and the company of disturbing family politics. Those stories were always most important to me, even if and when they ended in ruin. I boarded a plane at Logan with two bags, relocated across the country to take a chance on the ginger artist from Minnesota. We had only known each other 12 hours in person, and several weeks through hours-long phone calls and snail mail correspondence. I had to wait a couple more weeks after that until he arrived back in San Francisco from a post-grad school trip to Italy. We reunited, for good, at baggage claim on July 1, 2005.

So now we’re apart in reverse - him in California, me in Tuscany - but he is with me in flowers. The day before my birthday, he brought home a bouquet - orange ranunculus, white lilies, red hypericum, and glossy, tropical leaves in tri-fold origami - from a florist who asked Josh to say hello to his friend Larry in San Francisco, a bartender at the Buena Vista. I picture Larry building Irish coffees in the signature glasses that made the news last year for their endangered supply stream as his Italian buddy pulls together stems and blossoms a continent away. In their paper cone, the four lilies were all closed, but then opened, one by one, after Josh left. It’s a corny attribution, but, hell, I live for that shit.

I was raised by a horticulturalist and a musician - it was my inherited imperative to seek, with unswerving conviction, a verdant, operatic, brightly rendered love story for myself. My parents, high school sweethearts, divorced a few years shy of their 40th anniversary, and while their separation shattered our existing family paradigm, I am grateful to them for their rich model of love both as partners and as parents while raising me and my two sisters. They had a good run, and I hope they allow themselves that as our family heals toward our new reality. Because of them, I have priorities that at once make me a strong partner and allow me to receive a strong partner in Josh. I love, protect, feed, and celebrate my people fiercely - and can identify and privilege those ways of operating in the world by how clearly, generously, Josh reflects them back to me.

Taking care | solo cooking in Lucca

1. radicchio-red wine risotto

2. pea crostini with garlic, lemon, and pecorino al tartufo

3. prosciutto-pea frittata; arugula and strawberry salad; Aperol soda with gin and lemon

4. open-faced prosciutto cotto panino; Birrificio Brùton Bianca

5. zuppa di ricotta

6. bread pudding with carciofi, cime di rape, and mozzarella; prosecco

Golds.

Last night, I worked from a recipe written in Italian, and part of the English translation through an online tool I used read, delightfully, “Just obtain the gilding of the ingredients…” Removing the step from its original language revealed the Maillard reaction as wielding a sable brush.

Drinking a cappuccino at the bar, cafe with the maroon awning over the modest outdoor patio, a regular with a stack of papers in one arm calls out a greeting to the owners, an older couple, and slaps down a few euro. Having seen him coming, the woman is already pouring him a glass of prosecco. The cold, straw-colored wine, effervesces and immediately beads its vessel with condensation. I turn away, then back; the wine and the man are gone. The proprietress doesn’t flinch, busses his glass. It is just past 9:00 in the morning, Saturday. There is nothing derelict about this transaction, just a yellow component of routine like anything else.

The 13th century mosaic on the façade of the Basilica di San Frediano glints differently - now pixels, now sheen, now points, now gloss - as the day’s light inches across the leafing.
The buildings curved around the Piazza dell’Anfiteatro throw and catch the sun - butter, forsythia, ochre, roast.

Electric lichen in the valleys between terra cotta roof tiles.
Lucca apartment fabric: bedroom blanket spectrum, pollen fading to cornmeal; curtain stripes, alternating with cobalt.
Linens pinned to balcony lines and window light above the canal during a late-night walk around the block.
Custard in the bomboloni from Forno a Vapore Amedeo Giusti, and the local pasta dough - rich with yolk, a historical sign of wealth.

Breakfast from Via San Nicolao:

melon from the Saturday market
buccellato di Lucca (local sweet bread with sultanas and aniseed)
French (or, in this case, Italian) toast with strawberry-pink peppercorn-grappa syrup

4 snacks from Via San Nicolao

7 dinners + 1 lunch from Via San Nicolao:

1. roasted chicken thighs over fennel + purple torpedo onions; asparagus

2. frisée salad with leftover chicken, fennel, onions, asparagus + balsamic vinaigrette; pane toscano as crust for roasted Roma tomatoes, young garlic + semisoft cow’s milk cheese

3. pork loin stuffed with prosciutto, olives, parsley, rosemary, lemon zest + bread crumbs over escarole salad with olive-blood orange vinaigrette; rosemary potatoes

4. fresh gnocchi, fresh sausage, porcini, cipollini, zucchini

5. asparagus-lemon risotto with local pecorino; valeriana with citrus vinaigrette

6. panini with Forno Casali’s corn focaccia, mozzarella di bufala, valeriana, garlic, shallot, olives, lemon + olive oil

7. puntarelle in soup + salad

8. cut-to-order (by Francesco around the corner) steak with brandy-pepper-cream sauce; steamed purple artichokes; mashed potatoes

At our intended stop, the train doors stick when we try to open them, and we unwillingly stay on board until Pescia. A unicorn of a taxi takes us up, up, up to Montecarlo, a hilltop micro town founded in 1333 and now eponymous of a well-known wine region that also includes the neighboring communes of Altopascio, Caponnori, and Pocari. The terrace views and fortress walls hold a mid-morning hush, the day’s top heat at bay. We have a long chat with Matteo at the visitor’s center, newly opened in an old schoolhouse. He pours us tastes of a couple local wines as we consult maps, talk about the spring lull before tourist season flays open in Tuscany. A stone hatch under glass in the center of the lobby floor commemorates a wheat cellar from centuries back. We have just missed a destructive rainy season while the opposite threatens crops in California.

The town is a promontory from which to inspect the fields and vineyards below - and then only shutters, laundry, and sky between the narrow, sloped streets of the interior. Josh ventures into the post office to mail two postcards, gets stuck behind an innkeeper with a heap of paperwork. Outside, across the way, the innkeeper’s daughter, about three years old, drinks a glass of juice on her stoop. On the same side of the street as the post office lies the family’s patio with potted plants, one serving as organic hook for several lengths of red string. Finishing her refreshment, the girl gathers the string - her string - and constructs an elaborate leash between a small, flowering tree and the iron railing dividing the patio from the wide stairwell where I’m standing. It is good, honest play; the spare materials make perfect sense here. She mutters to herself. Someone calls her (“Charli!”) inside.

***

We walk down the hill to a deserted agriturismo and receive a perfunctory tour of a filthy (and not in a sexy, old-timey way, just in a coiled-hoses-and-mop-buckets-and-new-world-mold way) farmhouse holding the aging barrels and a three-wine tasting under an awning off the closed restaurant’s dining room, amid the off-season property repairs. The first wine’s 50/50 Vermentino/Viognier ratio is soft and floral; we buy a bottle and get the hell out of there.

***

Back in town, back near Charli’s string sculpture, we walk by an open door into a small restaurant a few steps below street level. Donatella, the chef, stands near the kitchen; Sergio, her husband, sits dejectedly at the nearest table. They light up when we peek inside, and we instantly know this is our spot for the afternoon.

We choose from a verbal menu, described by Sergio.

A 1/2 liter of Montecarlo rosso and little extras, gifts from the chef: olives, bright bruschetta shot through with slivers of red onion.

Homemade pasta (every morning, from Sergio’s grandmother’s recipes; later, we applaud mastery of this art, so elusive to us, and Sergio replies, “When you watch your grandmother and mother make, it’s not so hard.”) - painstakingly crimped tortelli Lucchese, stuffed with seasoned meat and served with ragù, and noodles (the name of which I can’t recall - about 2/3 as wide as tagliatelle, and a few millimeters thicker) tangled with earth (fresh porcini and lots of black pepper). Sergio sets down cheese and tells us it is only for the tortelli. I adore this kind but firm direction.

For dessert, we ask Sergio to pick his favorite for us: panna cotta with “fruits of the forest” (blackberries, raspberries, and red currants in a warm, tart, liqueur-tinged sauce).

Espresso. Sergio’s grappa.

We love all of it, and them. The plastic flowers, damp smell, and Italian pop radio blaring in the corner of the grotto dining room fall away - they care about the food, about taking care of people through their food. This is what matters; the rest, suddenly, does not.

Again, we learn a lot in little time. Sergio and Donatella opened their place two years ago. It’s been tough, with a limited audience and small-town everyone in everyone else’s business. Making a living in Italy is very difficult right now; lots of friends and family have moved out of the country to try elsewhere. They want bigger for their son - seven in May - a more expansive view of the world, less chatter. They have their eyes on São Paulo, will visit in September to suss out the possibility of opening a restaurant there. Donatella plays us some Brazilian music that she applies to low spirits, to keep herself looking forward. Before cooking, Donatella did restoration work in churches and historic buildings but didn’t like the dark, quiet spaces and lack of interaction with people. She’s sweet on Josh (can’t blame her). She says, forget Viareggio and go to the white sand beach in Vada instead.

We promise to write and post a rave review. They laugh when we tell them we’re planning on walking the 2+ kilometers to the Montecarlo-San Salvatore train station. Too far! So few trains! Neither of these things are true, but we listen politely as they discuss alternatives. And then Sergio shoots up the stairs and out into the street: “I take you!” We protest; he’s having none of it. Into the car and down, down, down to the Pocari station, two stops from Lucca. Grazie, ciao, dear Sergio.

***

Another favor: the 15:12 is late and we won’t have to wait an hour for the next one. We hastily board the train without validating our tickets - a huge no-no in Italian public transportation culture, and liable to result in a equally huge fine by a conductor unimpressed by Americans pleading forgetfulness. Final grace: no one trolls our car, we arrive back in Lucca unscathed. But marked.

1.
Here, when ordering, one “takes” (prendere) food and drink - verbally enacting lifting items off a marble bar or reaching for them on your table. In English, this sounds like abduction, snatching, obtaining without permission; rings of insolence, not asking nicely. But in Lucca, I hear it as the opposite side of the equation from give, a softer function, a finessed action. Dually: the ancient strength of Romance languages, and my deluded take on things in the shadow (literally, from our borrowed apartment) of a centuries-old tower topped by an oak grove. The stone and layered history, a drug.

2.
Packs of elderly women and gentlemen socialize during la passeggiata (evening walk) - on stone benches inside the walls, on park benches atop the walls, in clusters at cafes, gossiping on side streets. Earlier today, after our bike circuit on the ramparts, I watched a strong man contest on Via Santa Croce - a fellow in his 70s, if not older, lifting up one of his buddies to show off to the rest of the crew. A whole passel of them, cracking up as the sun hinted at setting. I have been trying to envision my old lady clique, Josh’s old man gang, as a result. If today, who would our venerable compatriots be? Who will still be with us in our 70s, 80s, 90s?